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Astroturfing For Speed Cameras
New submitter dalosla writes "Chicago's mayor is pushing to change red light cameras near schools and parks into speed cameras. Just about everybody sees it as a cash grab by the city. Today's Chicago Tribune has an article about how the expanded speed camera program would benefit Redflex, the company Greg Goldner, one of the mayor's long time political supporters, lobbies for. This is of merely local interest, but of wider interest in the article would be information about Goldner's astroturfing for Redflex around the country. Redflex is the sole financial supporter for the Traffic Safety Coalition, a 'grassroots' organization to promote more traffic camera usage and fight any attempts to restrict such cameras. Goldner has already successfully facilitated the killing of one anti-camera ballot measure in Texas."
It appears that the cameras for this system are already in place, they just need a software update to judge speeds in addition to the red light function they already have. This should be cheap to do, so how much is the city of Chicago paying this politically connected man to do this? Is it a fair price, or payback for campaign contributions?
This will probably continue for the same reason DUI laws keep getting more draconian - everyone is scared that if they speak against it they will be lambasted as uncaring assholes - which doesn't make for good campaigning. And good luck fighting any tickets you receive in a school zone, you insensitive bastard. You''re putting all of our kids at risk!
... or, really, anywhere with a ballot initiative process.
Citizens should push for ballot initiatives that require that all money collected for traffic and parking offenses goes back to the citizens as a tax credit. This should have broad popular support in most places.
Yeah, the police/DoT would have to raise taxes to replace the lost revenue... but it would create a system where they have no fiscal incentive to engage in highway robbery, which is what traffic enforcement these days amounts to.
Political patronage in Chicago?
I'm shocked!
Say no more--oh, wait, just one more thing, that "Chicago mayor" is none other than Rahm Emanuel.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
We have the cameras where I live, they don't work reliably. I have seen them go off for no reason and when someone made a perfectly legal right on red. I have a friend who lives next to one, he says they constantly go off when they should not. I for one will no longer make a right on red in intersections where they are located.
It's news that it's being done on a relatively small scale, but many large industry groups use similar astroturfing tactics. As soon as androids (the robots, not the phones) become cheap you'll see them pile out of buses to stage protests too.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Problem solved. And if you think the speed limits are too slow, then petition to have them raised rather than weaken the enforcement.
Of course one needs to make sure the camera owners are not cheating, like they were in D.C. (the yellow light was shortened in order to boost profits). I'm not sure how cheating happens with speed cameras but I'm sure there's a way. Perhaps the same way that New Mexican officer claimed I was doing 91 when I was only doing 79.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"Just about everybody sees it as a cash grab by the city."
Seriously? WTF?
If you don't want to pay the fines - don't break the speed limit / run the red light.
If - for some reason - you feel that you should have a constitutional right to go faster than the current speed limit / ignore signals there for the safety of you and those around you, lobby to raise the speed limit etc and have an open debate with the road safety argument and the balanced needs of everyone in the state.
For years Albuquerque had red light/speeding cameras at a lot of intersections. The public got tired of it, and the city council voted to drop the contract. After a long legal fight, the cameras finally got taken down.
Think that's the end of it? Hah.
See, because Redflex is a private citizen (thanks citizens united!), and not a governmental institution, the company couldn't file criminal cases against alleged speeders/red light runners, so any of the charges they brought forward were always civil cases. This also means that you don't have to go to court to fight the charges, pay any settlements, or essentially give a damn because no police officers saw the crime take place.
Why does this make a difference? Because Redflex was guaranteed something like 40% of the ticket price per incident. Which they're obviously not going to get. So what did they do? They sued the city for $4.5 million.
I find it interesting that the State of Arizona tore out its speed cameras as they actually were costing more money than they were generating in revenue and traffic collisions actually went up. Don't you believe that Traffic Safety Coalition as it stinks to high heaven of lobby group. Even some municipalities removed the cameras as they served no purpose whatsoever. The statistics are that 2/3s of all tickets issued by these systems have to be thrown out for one reason or another.
One of the things I would do is hire a statistician/economist to study speed/traffic enforcement and find out if law enforcement is even remotely performing enforcement relative to areas of high accidents. If its totally unrelated statistically, I'd hire a lobbyist (or maybe even a politician!) to publicly shame them for wasting money and just harassing people and possibly push for a law that would require the police to enforce traffic safety where there were actual problems with traffic safety. Maybe even make "speed traps" not in a state reported risk zone flat out illegal.
My guess is that 90% of police traffic/speed enforcement has literally nothing to do with traffic safety but instead is focused on where people are speeding (underutilized highways, in good condition, etc) and how easy it is to catch them (good hiding places, good weather, etc).
I've never heard of a police department doing an analysis on accidents, traffic volume, pedestrian volume and then choosing to focus enforcement efforts on areas where people actually have a lot of accidents related to traffic infractions.
I'm told by someone in law enforcement that in at least one upscale suburban community their speed enforcement on local streets has literally nothing to do with traffic safety -- they pick spots where people naturally speed by small margins (eg, 35 in a 30 zone) due to hills or lack of intersections for the express purpose of pulling them over, checking identification, and trying to get "easy" arrests for other offenses unrelated to traffic safety. Basically one step above a police state checkpoint.
I wonder if it has already been tried in the US of A, but there's a solution to this speed camera problem, which is widespread here in Italy:
1. the community must actually buy the equipment in an open bidding contest;
2. payment for the equipment is upfront, and any variable fee, maintenance fee etc. is prohibited, to avoid the "tax farming" problem;
3.[this is the neat one] when writing the budget, the community is absolutely forbidden to write in a single penny of expected revenue from speed camera, and any revenue must be written in at the year end as general proportional tax credit for the citizens, and by citizens I mean the ones who paid the taxes to build the road in question; in the case of an Interstate, all the money goes to the federal government.
4. penalty for noncompliance is loss of eligibility for election or work in any goverment owned or controlled entity. If the decision was taken by a committee, all the members willbe subject to said penalty.
If you implement all these resolutions, the political morons will not put speed camera in place, because, to all intent and purposes, they cannot spend the money; to actually spend the speed tickets income as they like, they must first pass a rise in other taxes to accomodate that income, receive it, spend it , and then use the ticket fund to lower the taxation again without being able to move that money about at will. Moreover, they'll have to fight to own the roads, meaning being responsible for the upkeep, and liable for any defect.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
In Maryland, for doing 68mph on the interstate. Supposedly it's a construction zone, and while they are doing work on the bridge it's mostly underneath. In fact I can't recall ever seeing a worker on the interstate itself.
Mind you, this "work zone" camera has been in operation since June 2010. Not sure why ANY construction zone should exist that long.
At $40 a ticket, and 200,000+ tickets it has generated over $8 million for the state of Maryland.
I think it's high time the people's champion, Anonymous, convene a flash mob to go all Cool Hand Luke on these UN-American red light cameras.
you know, for the LULZ...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Traffic cameras save lives. They're excellent. My gripe is against the companies that soak citizens for every ticket.
Municipalities need to cut out the middleman and employ their own camera systems.
There is a great open source opportunity here.
Don't break the speed limit.
Since nearly everyone speeds, how come we don't just raise limit? I'm assuming traffic legislator is introduced and voted for by state congressional representatives? Is their so much money involved in this racket that representatives simply look the other way? I seem to recall that one state doesn't have speeding tickets, instead they write citations for excessive fuel consumption, presumably as a way to de-crimalize speeding. When more people then not have convictions for speeding, I think the laws need to be change.
IIRC the bulk of the tickets in my area were for people stopping beyond the posted line in an intersection, not for running a red light. No safety issue at all like they say the cameras are supposed to promote. Simply having wheels on the white line. Yeah, that's going to increase safety.
The other issue was making the yellow light time shorter so that there was an increase in red light violations. Not tipping the odds or anything there.
Making this a business makes it not just prone to abuse but guarantees abuse. It's all about the profit.
One last thought. The flash from these cameras is actually a safety issue at night. All of a sudden you're seeing this insanely bright light and your night vision is shot. So they're creating an entirely different safety problem using the equipment that's promoted as increasing safety.
Why would they put Astroturf on them? Like thats going to hide it. pfft.
What I don't understand is how these tickets are even legal? You have to consent to any kind of traffic violation that a POLICE OFFICER would write you up for. They get your consent by getting you to sign for the ticket. When you get a letter in the mail saying you have a fine for speeding by getting caught on camera, when did you give your consent for the ticket? My suggestion, fight the ticket... Don't enter a guilty or not-guilty plea, just say "I don't consent". Don't answer if you knew or not if you were speeding. I'd just say I don't know, I wasn't looking at the speedo at that point in time, so you can't say for sure or not if you were or weren't speeding.
IANAL, but seriously stop just accepting tickets you didn't consent to...
"Then they came for me" ...because I was recklessly breaking the law too.
I ride a motorcycle as my primary transportation. I'm very much against running red lights. I'm also very much against being rear-ended. It's fairly common for me to come up on a yellow light where the timing is questionable and I have some moron riding my butt. The choice here is to stop short and be rear ended, continue normally and run a red light, or give it some throttle and get away from the problem entirely. Guess which choice I make?
Maybe speed cameras will force us to re-examine our absurdly low speed limits, and remove the guessing game that we all do when going over the speedlimit, but trying to stay slow enough so as not to get ticketed.
On I-95, outside of Philly, the speed limit is 55mph, but traffic flows between 65mph and 85mph.
Set the speed limit to 80mph and I'm totally good with speed cameras. Keep it at 55mph and you will have a riot.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Speed cameras register speeding offenses, nothing else. Whether, and to what extent, that's met by fines is determined by local politics (which everyone of us has a say in).
I can understand people who get a ticket don't like the camera, but that can't be a reason not to install them, can it?
As I see it, all those posts that wax eloquent about beating short yellow are barking up the wrong tree. It's easy enough to set the cameras so that they only register serious speeding offenses. It's just a matter of getting local politics to set reasonable criteria.
The essence of the problem seems to be that people simply distrust their local government to set a reasonable policy for those cameras. And isn't that a far more serious problem than mere cameras?
fines.
DON'T SPEED
look back to when mandatory seatbelt laws were rammed through in the 1980s. While everyone I knew was intensely opposed, most also just knew the laws would be passed anyway. Corruption and money always wins. I hope I am not the only one who remembers the phony polls, the blatant lies and the lobbying tricks that got those laws passed.
What has the world come to?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Traffic lights stop traffic. Speed cameras collect money.
If they want to reduce speeding in an area, put in speed bumps. You can tailor the contour (e.g. frequency) of the bumps according to the desired speed limit.
I only needed to read those three words to realize the whole thing is a sham.
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...just really stupid. How is enforcing the laws on the books a cash grab? Driving is a privilege, and one that comes with dire consequences when performed wrong. Just slow down and obey the speed limits. You'll save fuel compared to getting trapped by every red light from going faster than the signal timing, wear and tear on your car, and you'll have more time to react to hazards and emergencies.
Furries make the internet go.
One thing I am now doing--and I admit it's onerous to myself and those around me--is I've taken to obeying speed limits and taken extra care at traffic lights (since our region has them in various municipalities). It's a form of tax protest. Why help it pay off for them?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Yes, stop lights and speed limits equate to a police state. Take your meds before you have a heart attack.
They don't make any meds for what I've got.
The thing is, it's 2012, not 2007. Lots of cities have fallen victim to Redflex by now, to the detriment of every single one of them. It's not quite the negative-value trademark that, say, Diebold is, but it's pretty bad. On one hand, you need to do something for the children but on the other hand, you're talking hiring John Wayne Gacy for babysitting, as the "do something." Even people who are anti-due-process know that a Redflex contract isn't the right way to go. It's not that it doesn't help to remove due process (it's good for that, just like how hiring Gacy solves your kids' problems), it's that it's expensive and you're fucking your city over with a contract that every single citizen knows in advance is 100% guaranteed to be motivated by corruption.
Some communities in the chicago area put up these cameras for red light violators only to learn they were so effective at changing behaviors that revenue ultimately declined after an initial increase when the cameras were new! Illinois cops....the humans....for some reason are notorious for enforcing the speed limit somewhat arbitrarily only when you are speeding more than 10 miles over the posted limit rather than strict consistent enforcement of the speed limit, so it creates false security encouraging a little speeding on a regular basis by all drivers. Having all drivers speeding a little everywhere they drive our cops valid cause to pull anyone over easily based upon their discretion to more strictly apply the law to you than they do the other 99 percent of their time on the job. To really keep the gravey train going they'll have to put a rand function into the camera's ticketing logic.
That it's illegal to film a cop in Chicago without express written permission... but you can take pictures of anyone at a stoplight or on the highway with an automatic camera.
Question - can you prosecute the company for taking pictures of a speeding cop car?
the cameras by force. Don't put up with it. Get off your fat ass and do something. If you don't tell anyone, (as in NOBODY) then the odds of getting caught are actually fairly small. You are as enslaved as you let yourselves be enslaved.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just a few weeks ago they wanted to enforce school zone speeds 24 hours / 7 days a week. Is supposedly been changed, but I don't trust 'em.
Why does everyone believe that technology can't be programmed to lie? Speed cameras can be manipulated. As another poster pointed out, they can blink the lights red during a green or yellow to take a still shot of you "blowing" a red light. As with voting machines, why does everyone think that tech intrinsically always tells the truth when it is so tempting for those controlling the software to make it lie? When they have overwhelming motivation to lie?
I love how Slashdot always tap dances around naming names when liberals are to blame in things like this. The original post should have started out with "Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel...". However, after reading that far anyone familiar with Mr. Emanuel's background in Chicago and associations to Obama would have just rolled their eyes and said "Here we go again...".
Correct. There's no known medical cure for stupid.
I've worked for Redflex as a contractor, they were nice folks and good payers. Its such a pity they work for Satan and their soul purpose is to oppress the rights of the ordinary citizen and that every member of the company from the director down to the staff grandchildren should be put to fire and the sword.
Chicago and Illinois in general is the most corrupt place it's ever been my displeasure to live. We had and have high sales tax, a state tax, and through the roof property tax. Yet with all that we had terrible roads and a general lack of decent state services. Our taxes there simply fed corruption and left us with little to show for it.
Anyone who accepts the digital state police is an traitor to freedom. It's just another way for our government to bend us over and stick it to us and take what little we have left.
I think the good people of Chicago-land should look at what happened with Arizona's attempt to boost revenue with photo enforcement zones, and take steps now to keep their pols from wasting more of their tax dollars than they already have. Various municipalities in Az have contracted since 2008 with Redflex for a photo enforcement system consisting of 40 mobile and 38 fixed position cameras that are deployed mostly in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas, where 80% of Arizona's population live and work. The states auditor general's sunset study produced in 2010 when the Az Department of Public Safety declined to renew their contract with Redflex revealed some interesting things about the revenue generating abilities of photo enforcement zones. Drivers learned to route around both the fixed cameras and mobile cameras, the latters' locations being routinely broadcast during commute time radio shows, and drivers who received citations but failed to respond soon discovered there were no legal repercussions for failing to respond, largely because Redflex's cameras are not the same as a county mounty with a badge and ticket book, when it comes to legal jurisdiction.
Some cities in Az continue to use photo enforcement zones, but last year in June, SB 1398 was signed into law by governor Jan Brewer, which explicitly affirmed that recipients of a mailed photo enforcement citation are not obligated in any way to respond to it. More importantly, SB 1398 required that language to that effect be prominently printed on the mailed citation. According to the sunset study, only about a third of the mailed citations ever got a response; I imagine SB 1398 is going to effectively kill even that low rate, and the state is eventually going to have to go back to the old-fashioned way of having cops write tickets, if they actually want to generate a revenue stream from traffic citations.
Anecdotally, I've been popped half a dozen times since the system went operational in 2008 and have yet to pay a single dime in fines. I received the citations in the mail the first three times; they went directly from mail box to recycle bin because my attorney told me after I received the first one that they had no legal standing. I've been popped three times since SB 1398 went into effect; I'm still waiting for either a mailed citation or a knock on the door for any of these three, though I know that two of the three are beyond the 90 day statute of limitations (also reaffirmed in SB 1398, btw) so I doubt I'll see anything.
All in all, it looks like (at least here in Az) that photo-enforcement zones are not the revenue producers that Redflex would like to think they are. Indeed -- Chandler and Mesa are actually operating in the red, with Mesa reporting almost $1M in red ink over the last three years for their Redflex photo enforcement system.
The Redflex speed cams have been banned in Queensland, Australia, where Redflex is based.
This is on the basis of poor digital security. The MD5 checksum used can easily be duplicated in a fake/altered photo.
If you think this isn't a big deal, Redflex usually gets a cut of the fine, and provides all the processing services!